paid for his home and 200 acres of land.
He is more fortunate than some. Cancer
felled many miners, especially those who la
bored prior to the 1960s, when the industry
improved ventilation and dust-control. Sta
tistics finger tobacco as a contributing fac
tor. Most of the younger victims were
smokers.
IT WAS A WONDERFUL RIDE that
Gary Dean got, courtesy of the rock that
burns. "Investors were coming here in
private jets. I lived on the phone, saying
'This is a deal, this is a deal.' People wired
money-'Buy this, sell this.'"
Before becoming Gary Dean of Gary
In the rout of an
invisible enemy, workmen
demolish the floor of a
GrandJunction home
found to contain
radioactiveradongas at
higher than acceptable
levels. Like others in the
western Coloradocity,
the house was built on
landfill composed of
tailingsfrom mills that
furnished uranium to the
government. Federaland
state agencies are
cooperatingin removal
of tailingsbecause of the
carcinogenicdecay
products of the gas.
Dean Investments, with offices near the
Colorado River in Rifle, he had managed a
supermarket and owned a bar. He also
owned a parcel of land.
"One day Occidental Petroleum popped
in, and suddenly I'd made half a million
dollars off that land."
Thus, in 1980,
was he initiated into the oil-shale boom,
then beginning. "I went out and bought
and optioned all the land I could get
my hands on."
Canadians and Europeans came, and
men from Los Angeles and New York,
wanting land for shopping centers, subdivi
sions, condominiums. Gary obliged them,
creating corporations and partnerships.
There have been other oil-shale booms; in
the 1920s oil companies tied up billions of
tons of shale along and north of the Colorado
River. With petroleum prices staying high in
1980 and 1981 and overseas supplies seem
ingly unreliable, many oil companies
thought shale's time had truly come.
All you had to do was mine the stuff, heat
it to 900°F, and draw off the viscous raw
shale oil. Refine that and-presto!-petro
leum. The possibilities were enormous; a ton
of rock would yield 35 gallons of oil.
The petroleum companies began to
spend. The town of Parachute ballooned
from 300 people to 1,200. The oil companies
invested millions there and in nearby Battle
ment Mesa on housing, schools, and ser
vices. Construction workers lived in
recreational vehicles, some in tents. At night
they helped O'Leary's in Parachute become
the sudsiest bar in Colorado.
Then some oil companies began to have
second thoughts. They put their shale proj
ects on hold. Costs were high; the extracting
process apparently was not as promising as
engineers had hoped. Colony Oil Shale,
however, was going full bore and, reassur
ingly, its major partner, Exxon, was the
world's largest corporation.
Black Sunday, May 2, 1982. They made
ColoradoDreaming
215